Film Format: 16mm

  • Storytelling

    This award-winning film features performances by master storytellers telling tales which together outline the trajectory of a lifespan, from creation, birth, heroic adulthood, to death and regeneration. The stories are inter-cut to effect an almost Proppian analysis of narrative and to suggest an alternative position for women as producers and heroes of culture.

  • Striptease

    This is a documentary which treats the subject in terms of work, performance and sexuality. In striptease as in dominant cinema, women are presented as sexual spectacle, silent objects to be looked at. This film presents the dancers as speaking subjects, constructing a job profile from the point of view of the women who do the work.

  • Study in Color and Black And White

    The title is almost the whole of any possible description of this hand-painted and photographically step-printed film which exhibits variably shaped small areas of colour (in a dark field) which explode into full frames of textured colour interwoven with scratch patterns that create a considerable sense of interior depth and three-dimensional movement. (SB)

  • Bent Time

    “A visual trip across the U.S. using an extreme wide angle lens that bends time to the edges while Hammer shoots one frame per foot of visual space traversed. The film’s length, 22 minutes, matches the time it takes sunlight to traverse a petroglyph of nine circles inscribed in rock at Ohaco Canyon, New Mexico. The film opens and closes with shots of this process and the minutes between take us from the Brooklyn Bridge to the Golden Gate. “Hammer concentrates on the condensation of space and time at high energy locations, from the rock passageways of Ohaco Canyon to…

  • Sunstone

    A moon-faced mask is transformed, made to gleam with vibrant, radiant light and colour. Pulling back, the camera reveals other versions of the mask on the sides of a rotating cube and, on one of the cube’s sides, a Marey-like depiction of human movement is traced and colourized. The control of movement, the creation of a sense of holographic space, and the array of colours are products of the film’s computer animation, using some of the techniques developed by the New York Institute of Technology.

  • Surface Tension

    “The influence of minimalist art (rather than the aesthetic of minimalist art) on the avant-garde cinema is very great. Most of the important young filmmakers, especially on the east coast, might be considered minimalists. Certainly Frampton’s Surface Tension is from that milieu. The film itself has three parts: a comic static shot emphasizing the passage of time; a fast motion tour through a city with fractured German commentary; and a slow seascape with fish floating mid-screen. In this last section, phrases translated from German commentary are printed over the image… The narrator’s voice belongs to Kaspar Koenig, as indeed also…

  • Surfacing on the Thames

    “The loveliest Rimmer film (and the cleverest Rimmer title) shows a river boat slowly steaming past the Houses of Parliament – so slowly that it seems not to be moving, and surrounded by such luminous mistiness that one critic is supposed to have thought he was looking at a Turner painting rather than at film footage. Gradually the surface of the film begins to wrinkle slightly, to spot, to show minor blemishes – in a sense to assert itself above and before the rich density it contains. The gesture is tentative and discreet, but it is also unsettling and liberating…

  • Surviving Memory

    “Surviving Memory” is a film about the role of loss in the formation of identity. It is a narrative intercut with documentary fragments of political actions, which connect the various characters to event through collective memory. Through autobiographical spoken texts, the narrator relays fragments of a relationship between two Jewish women. The fragmented texts speak of the relation between these women as well as recounting various past and contemporary historical events of fascist and neo-Nazi activity (and resistance), Lesbian/Gay rights, Pro-Choice and AIDS demonstrations. While these instances tell a personal/political story about loss, they are also meant to elucidate the…

  • Suspension

    An interpretation of a state of suspension through visual effects, dance, movement and sound. It represents a “state” rather than a “journey.” Events occur within the film as might be seen in an abstract painting that is in motion.

  • Sweep

    “Sami called and asked me to go north with him and make a film about where his great-grandfather, Robert Flaherty, had been in Fort George. I suggested we stop in Kapuskasing to see the place where my mother’s family first settled when they arrived from Europe. Two men, on the road AGAIN, sifting through past worlds where there is everywhere, dusty remnants of the ‘great white father.’ Colliding head on with the passing present we see him in us.” – Phil Hoffman Sound design: Randall Smith